Smash TV: How Williams Turned a Game Show Into Twin-Stick Carnage
Walk into an arcade in 1990 and you would hear it before you saw it: a grinning host bellowing “I’d buy that for a dollar!” over a storm of gunfire and exploding toasters. That was Smash TV, Williams Electronics’ brutal, funny, endlessly quotable love letter to the twin-stick genre. It looked like a cartoon. It played like a stress test. And it quietly rewired what players expected an action cabinet to do.
Development: Jarvis, Turmell, and a Deadly Game Show
Smash TV was designed by Eugene Jarvis and programmed by Mark Turmell, released on the Midway Y Unit hardware in April 1990. Jarvis was already a legend for Defender and, crucially, Robotron: 2084, the 1982 game that put a movement stick in your left hand and a firing stick in your right. Smash TV is openly a spiritual successor to Robotron, keeping the twin-joystick controls and the single-screen arena structure while swapping the abstract robot apocalypse for something nastier and sillier.
The setting is a dystopian television broadcast in the far-off year of 1999, a violent game show where contestants blast waves of enemies to win cash, prizes, and their own survival. The satire wears its influences on its sleeve, borrowing heavily from RoboCop and The Running Man, two 1987 films obsessed with media violence. That catchphrase, “I’d buy that for a dollar,” is a direct RoboCop lift, delivered by a host who cheerfully wants you dead.
Turmell, who would later create NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat contributions, has told the story of how he landed at Williams in the first place: when Hasbro pulled the plug on an interactive movie project he was working on, he went to Williams to design coin-op games. Smash TV was one of the results, and it is hard to imagine a better calling card.
Why It Matters
Robotron introduced the two-stick control scheme, but Smash TV is the game that popularized it and cemented it as a cabinet standard. The layout is instantly readable: left stick to move, right stick to shoot, aim independent of direction. That separation of movement and aiming is the entire foundation of the twin-stick genre, and Smash TV sold it to a mainstream arcade audience with color, humor, and spectacle.
It also leaned hard into cooperative play. Two contestants could drop in side by side, and the co-op mode rewarded the player who grabbed the most cash and prizes with extra bonuses. That small competitive wrinkle inside a cooperative game is pure genius, turning teammates into frenemies who both want to survive and want to out-loot each other. For a deeper look at where the genre went next, see our pillar guide to the Top 10 Twin-Stick Shooters of All Time.
How It Feels
Smash TV is relentless. Each room is a single screen that seals shut, then floods with enemies: grunts sprinting from every wall, orbs, mines, tanks, and mutant announcers. You are always outnumbered, always backpedaling, always painting the floor with bullets. The tension comes from that arena design. You cannot run away, so you learn to circle, to funnel, to read spawn points.
Between the killing, the game dangles temptation. Prizes rain down: cash, VCRs, toasters, keys, and the occasional extra life, each one begging you to break formation and grab it before a grunt reaches you. Weapon pickups transform your character from a peashooter into a walking arsenal, with the spread gun, the grenade launcher, and the coveted rocket launcher turning survival into showmanship. Clear the waves, pick an exit door, and the layout branches toward bosses and bonus rooms. Add a second player and the screen becomes glorious chaos, two contestants weaving through the same firestorm, occasionally stealing each other’s loot.
Legacy
Smash TV earned the Amusement and Music Operators Association’s “most innovative game” award in 1990 and was later inducted into GameSpot’s greatest games list in 2004. Its direct sequel, Total Carnage, pushed the formula further, and its DNA runs through decades of twin-stick design, from Geometry Wars to the modern co-op onslaught of games like Helldivers. None of it happens without the arena-shooter template Jarvis established in Robotron 2084 and refined here. The two-stick cabinet, the arena wave loop, the drop-in co-op: Smash TV is where those ideas became a genre rather than a novelty.
Lesser-Known Fact
Here is a detail that rarely makes it into the highlight reels. Smash TV shipped with a hidden “Pleasure Dome” bonus level that was added after launch, specifically because arcade operators reported that skilled players were actually finishing the game and needed something more to chase (as documented on the game’s Wikipedia entry). In other words, the developers underestimated their own audience, patched in a secret reward for the elite, and turned “I beat it” into “I found the room you’re not supposed to reach.” It is a small piece of history that captures exactly how arcade games evolved in real time, tuned against the quarters and reflexes of the people playing them.
FAQ
Who made Smash TV? It was designed by Eugene Jarvis and programmed by Mark Turmell, released by Williams Electronics in April 1990 on Midway Y Unit hardware.
Is Smash TV a sequel to Robotron? Not officially, but it is widely described as a spiritual successor. It reuses Robotron: 2084’s twin-joystick controls and single-screen arena format, wrapped in a violent game-show theme.
What is that famous quote? “I’d buy that for a dollar!” is the host’s signature line, lifted directly from the 1987 film RoboCop.